White-ball avant-gardes England stand between India and a World Cup final

The Overview:

Landscape gazing from an aircraft window can make for a fun exercise. Because each city, when viewed from an elevation, has a story to tell. Those with a window seat on the way to Adelaide get a great sight of The Oval. Even from a thousand feet up in the air, it's hard to miss the stadium nestled in a leafy part of the South Australian capital just north of the city centre. It is three parts modern mega-structure with its bulbous white canopies and one part grass bank at the northern end housing the old scoreboard. A great blend of the new with the old. The architectural revamp was mostly well received in 2014, which is not always a given, for it risked tampering with charm and history that traverses back to the Chappells, Bradman and beyond.

Like the venue of their semifinal, India is a country that maybe moving forward by way of disposition, but loves tethering itself to history. It's also reflected in the country's T20 game. For long it was characterised by a sense of pragmatism that didn't quite do justice to the available talent pool. Rohit Sharma and Rahul Dravid had little choice but to consider the alternate theory after the muddle that engulfed the team's campaign last year, and their project redesign gathered momentum through several bilaterals. Until they landed in Australia, where early-season conditions flipped that narrative on its head.

But India have had little trouble tapping into their history and playing a brand of cricket that, like the Oval, is part modern and part antique. Suryakumar Yadav and Arshdeep Singh have brought freshness to their game while the enduring class of Virat Kohli has kept them afloat when the going has encountered the rough sea. This journey now faces its moment of truth against England, for whom Adelaide was a major